Old Master, New Place

By Pico Iyer

Long before Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies, long before Monica Ali won thousands of devoted readers with her heartrending Brick Lane, another novelist was offering us exquisitely detailed portraits of bodies in transit--Easterners in the West, half-Westerners back "home" in the East, people who don't know where they belong--and master classes in the art of sly and sensuous fiction. Born to a German mother and a Bengali father in India, long a resident of Britain and the U.S., Anita Desai was a global, migrant writer before such a thing was fashionable.

For those of her generation--Desai was born in 1937, only a few years after the likes of V.S. Naipaul and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala--foreignness has itself been a driving theme. The classic Desai figure is the title character of her most propulsive novel, 1988's Baumgartner's Bombay, an old-style German long settled in India who comes into fatal contact with a younger German of the mobile, backpacking generation. Nowadays, when millions are living in places not fully their own, foreignness is nothing to write home about. The characters in Ali's and Lahiri's fiction might be the daughters, even the granddaughters, of Desai, faced not with a split between cultures but with a curious fusion.

In The Zigzag Way (Houghton Mifflin; 159 pages), the connoisseur of displacement takes her sharp eye to Mexico, though all her main characters, as always, come from somewhere else. Eric, a mousy innocent abroad, has followed his grad-school girlfriend across the border and there runs into a fellow refugee, Dona Vera, who presides over a salon of sorts called the Hacienda de la Soledad, concealing her European past behind flamboyant displays of Indian folklore. In the third panel of the narrative's triptych, we travel back to 1910, when the British came to the area to exploit its mines and miners. That one of them, caught up in the revolution, was Eric's grandfather bears out the traditionalist's truth that time moves not forward, but around.

Desai is a literary watercolorist who writes as if TV had not been invented, registering sounds and sights as a way to suggest more subtle currents underneath. As she describes Mexico, her prose catches fire with the smoke of copal, the "shriveled scorpions and fried grasshoppers" the Zapotec women lay out on the sidewalks, the trucks "rattling over cobbles the shape and size of human skulls." The skeletons that dance behind even a hotel reception desk remind us that the past here has the present in its thrall.

What Desai catches more deeply, though, is all that can't be seen or said. She gives us her pilgrims from the inside out, illuminating their hopes but wise to their illusions. And as Eric, a budding scholar of immigration, learns about more final passages, there is a musk of Lawrencian magic hovering around the social comedy. The terrain of Anglo-Indian confusion that Desai helped discover is now looking close to overcrowded. In The Zigzag Way, she stakes out new ground and so yields discoveries about places not found on any map. --By Pico Iyer